EXPLANATION WITH REFERENCE TO THE CONTEXT - GOOD-MORROW BY JOHN DONNE

Explain the following extracts with reference to the context.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

Where can we finde two better hemispheares

Without sharpe north, without declining west?

REFERENCE

(i) Poem: The Good-Morrow

(ii) Poet: John Donne

CONTEXT

(i) Occurrence: Stanza 3 (Lines 15-18 / 21)

(ii) Content: This poem is considered to be one of the best poems belonging to the metaphysical school of poetry. It describes the poet's profligate past and his present spiritual awakening. The subject is love, love seen as an intense, absolute experience, which isolates the lovers from reality and gives them a different kind of awareness; a simultaneous narrowing and widening of reality. This perfect love is immortal and it makes the lovers immortal too. 

EXPLANATION

     In these lines the poets talks about the unique beauty of the love which he and his beloved, Anne Moore, share. Face-to-face with his lover, the poet sees his own face reflected in her eyes and assumes that she can see his too. It demonstrates a spiritual bond between them. Gazing into her eyes, the poet claims that emotional honesty resides in the face. The pure love in their hearts is written in their eyes and the expression of their mouths. The poets then puts a rhetorical question about their hearts, using a conceit to compare them to two separated hemispheres. Sure, the world has its own hemispheres, but those are an inferior product. The heart-hemispheres are perfectly designed and perfectly matched. With no cold wintry north, these hearts are full of warm southern love; and with no west, where the sun sets every day, bringing darkness to the world, they hold nothing but constancy and light. Thus the lovers world is out of this world, so it does not have the same problems as the real world has, it is utopic perfect.